ViewsFlash 2.93 Release Notes |
The current release is ViewsFlash 2.93, Build 918. The software build number appears at the left of the Administration screen. All suggestions for clarification are welcome. Bugs Fixed are at the bottom of the page. In the documentation, items introduced in 2.9 through 2.93 are marked .
Release 2.93 added significant functionality:
Top N display. New style tags allow showing a different display for the top 3 winners in a contest, for example, or anyone who receives more than 15% of the vote.
Time remaining display. New style tags allow showing a poll or survey's opening and closing time, as well as the time remaining before polls close, in real time. They can be used in both poll and response pages.
Easy redirection. An option in the Response page lets you redirect the visitor to a different page after they vote. Previously, this required the use of the history tag; that still works, but this makes it easier to do. All the same redirection options as the Security page are available, and no template changes are required to use this option.
Very frequent extra reports can now be produced every second, minute, or hour. Reports can be included in other pages using server side includes.
Extra fields. Each answer to a question can now have additional fields, such as a URL or the name of a gif. Makes it very easy to construct attractive presentations.
Enhanced Java Extensibility. Similar to the Validator classes, these new application "hooks" let you execute your own Java code when a poll or survey is published (OnPublish) , and when a valid vote is received (OnVote).
Synchronization. In distributed configurations where a shared file system is not allowed, this feature replicates data between the different machines' file systems automatically in real time, using an HTTP protocol. Contact Cogix for further information.
Release 2.92 is a minor release with incremental improvements:
Extraneous values in voting forms are ignored.
Live Results has been enhanced to show question names; percentages add up to 100.
When answers' values are changed after Publishing, a subsequent Publish that
resets counts removes obsolete values from results lists.
Release 2.91 is a minor release with incremental improvements:
A monitoring API that can be used by data center administrators to diagnose the health of a ViewsFlash machine.
A "Write-in" choice automatically adds an "Other" button and a text field to a multiple choice question. New Poll Style Template tags [/ifonclick] and [/vfonclick] added to support this capability, and they are included in the Standard_ Poll Style template.
A new method for using a single cookie to detect duplicate voting in many polls. See Cookie Flavors.
Save the IP address of a visitor by entering "ipaddress" in the Cookie Name field in the Save page.
Enhanced Custom Validation. You can now access all values in a request when validating a vote, such as the cookies and the HTTP headers. Custom validation classes compiled with versions prior to 2.91 should be recompiled.
New style templates. All templates have been revised to use HTML classes and style sheets, in keeping with contemporary HTML usage.Templates are now installed in a directory named styles2, so as not to conflict with previous templates, which continue to work unchanged.
Zero All button at the bottom of the place page allows resetting the counts of all current and future polls at once.
Release 2.9 is a major release combining usability enhancements and relational database support. Main enhancements are:
Application security. A new optional servlet parameter can be used to require passwords to be re-entered after a specified interval.
Database support. With this add-on module, you can save each collected survey as one database record. You can also save results dynamically moment by moment and use the live information in real-time systems.
Usability improvements. Menu wordings are shorter. places and style templates are listed in alphabetical order. Polls are sorted by start times. Save, Tally and E-mail pages include a Select All button.
Default settings. All polls in the Master polling place are now listed in the "Copy options from" pull-down that you use when creating a poll. If you pick one, the next time you create a poll ViewsFlash remembers which one you picked the last time. These two features, combined, make it much easier to create standard polls and use them throughout the site.
Publish override. When you Publish a poll, if the dates conflict with a previously scheduled poll, a pop-up window gives you the option to reschedule the other polls automatically.
Question editing. You can now copy a question and its values, rearrange answers up and down, and edit an answer's value.
Field sizes. You can specify the width of a text field and the height and width of a text box right in the question.
View results as spreadsheet. On the Live Results page, you can view your stored data in the browser, as before, or in your spreadsheet. The data is displayed as a .csv file which most browsers translate into a sequence of operations that brings up excel and loads the data right into it. You can view either the data saved to ASCII files or the data saved to the database.
API Enhancements and new Reference Guide. Several new API commands are provided that allow discovering what polls are scheduled and when. The "history" parameter for redirection now substitutes URLs such as ?action=r and preserves other parameters in the command tail.
In 2.91
When a poll or survey is removed permanently, its database table is now
removed if ViewsFlash created it originally.
When poll settings were changed after publishing, satellites were not always aware of the changes.
In 2.90
Cookies. When a poll was published without an Ending date, cookies used in Security sometimes would expire immediately. This did not affect cookies thrown by the history parameter. Cookies thrown by the history parameter after a second attempt at a duplicate vote, were set incorrectly, allowing for a duplicate vote every other time.
Pop-up polls form handling. The revised EmbeddedPoll.html template contains the recommended HTML for displaying results in pop up windows. This entails using method=get, hiding the window location bar. In polls sent by e-mail and with some ill-behaved AOL 4.0 browsers, this method gives much more consistent results than method=post.
Master poll test voting. If you didn't press submit on the Master Poll's Response page, votes would not be tallied until you did. This only affected the Master poll.
Publishing overlap. When two polls were scheduled in a place back to back with no interval in between, occasionally the earlier poll was ended after the new poll was started, resulting in an incorrect new poll. Also, when using the getpoll API, there was a 10 second window during a changeover before the new poll appeared. Similarly, when using the getresults API, it took up to 10 seconds before the old results went away and new results were shown; sometimes this caused results to be shown with no votes but the previous poll's legends.
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